Valentine’s Day will have passed but your love lives on!

Join us on February 15—the day after Valentine’s Day—for an evening celebrating writing on love, in all its forms. The evening’s program will feature work from five writers, including editor Alexander Chee and contributor Aube Rey Lescure of The Best American Essays 2022.

Tell-All Boston is Boston’s only live-on-stage literary reading series dedicated to the craft of memoir and personal essay. After two years of virtual readings, Tell-All Boston is excited to be back with an IN-PERSON event, brought to you by the alumni of the GrubStreet's Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator co-sponsored by GrubStreet and Porter Square Books. For our February 15th event, we are excited to highlight GrubStreet Novel Incubator alum, Aube Rey Lescure, as one of our special guest readers.

SPECIAL GUESTS: 

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays.

He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, a NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak.

He teaches as an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.


Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese-American writer. She grew up between Provence, northern China, and Shanghai before graduating from Yale University in 2015. She worked in foreign policy before becoming an itinerant novelist.

She currently works as the Deputy Editor at Off Assignment. Two essays she edited are anthologized in Best American Travel Writing 2021.

Aube is the co-author of Creating a Stable Asia (Carnegie 2016) and the translator of Le Système Économique Chinois Face à ses Défis (éditions Nuvis 2017).

Aube received support as an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers’ Room of Boston, a Pauline Scheer Fellow at GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator Program, and a writer-in-residence at the Studios of Key West and Willapa Bay AiR.

Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Guernica, WBUR, The Florida Review Online, Jellyfish Review, Entropy Magazine, Medium, and more. Her essay “At the Bend of the Road” will be featured in Best American Essays 2022.

She is currently working on her first novel, an excerpt of which was a semifinalist in the Boston Review’s 2020 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. Her short fiction was selected as a finalist for BOMB Magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest, judged by Ottessa Moshfegh.

Other Featured Readers

Reina Adriano (she/her) graduated from Ateneo de Manila University with bachelor's degrees in Applied Mathematics and Creative Writing. She participated in the 14th Ateneo National Writers Workshop and the 12th Virgin LabFest Fellowship Writing Program in the Philippines. She currently resides in New Hampshire and works as a pricing analyst. 

 J. R. A. McClure's (he/him) short fiction has appeared in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, and he is a graduate of GrubStreet's Novel Incubator. He's currently finishing a novel in verse about a family, a cabin, and a maybe-maybe-not-imaginary bear. He lives in Wakefield, Mass.

Ellen Braaten (she/her) is a child psychologist and writer who lives in Boston. Her most recent book, Bright Kids Who Couldn’t Care Less: How to Rekindle Your Child’s Motivation, will be published by Guilford Press in March of 2023. In addition to writing professional and trade books, her personal essays have appeared in NBC Think and Herstry. She is currently a student in Grubstreet’s Essay Incubator Program.

Tell-All Boston Presents: Readings on Love